"Any spiders, bats or eye of newt still caught in my brown hair?"
"Naw."
By the strobe light Temple could see Matt grin as he dusted bat droppings--tiny black rubber balls the size of poppy seed--from his own hair before he added, "We would have to pay for classy souvenirs like that. If you catch one of those spiders, save it."
"This is all such simple stuff, but I've learned one thing."
What?"
They were walking in the dark again, waiting for the next shock to the system.
"Fright is not about sophistication, is it?"
His hand tightened on hers. "That's a rather profound observation-- Watch out!"
Where? Who? What? When--now? Arghghgh ...
Temple tripped on an unexpected sudden step up and found herself scooped into a passing chair. Matt grunted as he landed beside her.
They were swept away together, into the dark, a situation that might have been romantic if their stomachs hadn't been fighting mal de mer.
No hand-holding here. Just grabbing for anything stable to hang on to ... the seat-side, the floor beneath their feet, a pipe ... no, a steel bar that held them in the open car.
"This is a ride! " Temple announced indignantly to the dark.
The dark echoed her, adding vibrato and a bass to a first-soprano slide that made her words into a shriek.
"Nobody mentioned an echo-mike," she added, hearing those few words expand into an eerie aria for all to hear. "Must it make me sound like I'm whining?"
It did.
"Shhh," Matt counseled sensibly from the dark.
Even though he was male, he probably wasn't as fiercely adamant as she about being in control of herself. When you're a grown woman five feet zero short, you have to fight to keep both your feet on the ground. Temple felt real anxiety. Where was she? Where was she being carried away to? When would it stop? Was there a God?
This wasn't a foxhole, but it certainly wasn't what she had expected. That alone made it a successful attraction. She would have to rethink subjecting impressionable youngsters to this kind of trauma in the Jersey Joe Jackson Hidden Mine. On the other hand, only kids could take such programmed stress and bounce back giggling for more. When did they grow up and realize that they have something more to lose than their cookies? When had that happened to her?
"You okay?" Matt sounded worried.
"Apparently. You?"
"I won't order the fried onion rings before this thing next year."
"You'd come back?"
"Sure. It's a hoot."
Temple hooted in despair and had it reverberated right back.
"What do they do if they don't get an over-reacter like me?" she wondered under her breath.
"They probably run a tape of Madonna backwards."
"You know about Madonna?"
"How could I not?"
"Is she a hoot, too?"
Silence. Temple wondered whether the outerwear underwear or the almost-blasphemous name gave him pause.
"I think she's a troubled soul," he said, loudly enough for the mocking sound system to pick it up and repeat it until the word "soul" rocketed off the unseen walls like spraying surf.
Wails and shrieks, laughter turned to screams came rolling in like breakers, breakers of the sound barrier. Uninhibited, the sounds sobbed and crashed. Some seemed to come from other riders; other sounds--groans, moans, cries of anguish--seemed piped in, at least Temple hoped so.
Now they were climbing the dark, their small car seeming to travel upward at a right angle.
Temple tensed her body against any surface it touched, fearful of losing this last island of solidity. Matt, she knew, was engaged in the same struggle. Only sound ricocheted around them. She began to feel sub-marine, like something that floated, steering by sound, an explorer of watery spaces.
Brightness sifted into the vastness, spotlights cut through midnight Jell-O. The cries continued, but not from their car. Something bobbled in the dark distance, fuzzy and unfocused like fog, or fireflies, or Tinkerbell on LSD.
"Hang on," Matt warned just before the phantom swooped toward them, grew into motes of shimmering rainbow light, shot out ectoplasmic limbs ... eight of them, like Shiva, goddess of death. The head was feline, panther-black in a ruby collar.
Temple felt the soft passage of boneless limbs; saw the cat face fracture into a fang-lined maw, then reel by waving eight long black fuzzy tails like a tarantula's legs.
"Ooooh!"
They were spun around, dipped quickly enough to maroon their stomachs on an upper level, then spun fast into a cavern lit by undersea green. Skeletons danced on the water, skulls floated under the water-dappled ceiling, bony hands snagged their clothes, the car sides, then pulled away and snapped into fragments while a spectral voice promised to reveal all the secrets of the dead seas.
They plunged again, and the car was streaking through water!
Splashed by liquid again, this time quite wet and wild and genuine, Temple squealed on cue. So, from the sound effects, did every other female currently enduring the attraction.
Why didn't men scream?
Matt was an unseen stoic beside her. She had her own spirit guide along. Not as spirit, but as a person unafraid of the spiritual. Of the spooky by necessity. Of the dead and the undead.
Or, at least, she thought he was beside her....
Temple uncurled her fist from the steel bar hot under her grip and reached into the dark beside her.
A phosphorescent snake of mist wreathed her arm, then coiled toward her torso.
She batted it away, but now it curled around the steel bar toward the only hand that still clenched it. Hers. Matt. Where was Matt?
Ghostly faces hovered and whispered. Dank, chill breath brushed her face. Other faces loomed up from underwater beneath the car, floating like lilies on the black, mottled surface.
Swoop.
Up again, where flying monsters shrieked louder than the screams of women and children, and came onward with great, stretched talons. Temple ducked, as programmed to do, hating the knee-jerk reaction.
And then something caught her attention, and held it.
A crystal ball floating in the middle distance, encompassing a room. A normal room, though glassed in all around, like a custom railroad car. And, as the car careened closer, with normal people in it.
Maybe.
For a woman in a long gown paced before the fireplace.
A man lifted a glass of brandy to his mustached lips. Music whined from an old record on an older Victrola. A child sat on the wooden bench, turning the pages of a book much too big for its tiny hands. A dog lay on the hearth rug sleeping, floppy ears fanned on the Oriental design.
So sharp, that scene, like a play when the curtain is opened and the little world of stage set and directions begins to turn and unfold. A mystery in the making.
And she, floating toward it on mental swells of a Viennese waltz....
Then the woman's face turns from the firelight, and is scarred into a mere mask of humanity. The man stands to smash his glass into the hearth... on goat-hoof stumps protruding from his striped trousers. The child rises, upside down, and floats up to the ceiling to float there like a jellyfish just under the surface of the sea. The book flaps its pages like wings and begins beating against the window glass, again and again. The dog... the dog rises as a gigantic black cat, a panther bigger than the Parthenon, powerful as a bat-winged lion, and turns around and around until screams shriek to escape the tiny world growing bigger, big enough to crush, as Temple is swept past it like Dorothy in her wind-borne house on the way to Oz.
Now she can hear and feel the rattle of the rails her car rides on, now inhale the dark smells of stone and water, now sense a straight, level shot to somewhere recognizable.
"Some ride," Matt's voice declares from the dark.
Ride. Right. Over.
The light is real, constant and unbearable.
Gruesome faces hover, leaning over to help them leave the car that was their wooden shoe through Foreverland. That's how long it felt they had been gone, out of touch, in other hands, not in command of themselves.